Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Modern Charity: Morality, Politics, And Mid-Twentieth Century Us Writing, Matt Bryant Cheney
Theses and Dissertations--English
Scholars over the past two decades (Denning, Szalay, Edmunds, Robbins) have theorized the different ways literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century reflects the dawn of the liberal US welfare state. While these studies elaborate on the effect rapidly expanding public aid had on literary production of the period, many have tended to undervalue the lingering influence on midcentury storytelling of private charity and philanthropy, those traditional aid institutions fundamentally challenged by the Great Depression and historically championed by conservatives. If the welfare state had an indelible impact on US literatures, so did the moral complexity of the systems of charity and …
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
But What Has Helga Crane To Do With The West Indies? Plantation Afterlives In The Black Atlantic, Rachel Mckenzie Carr
Theses and Dissertations--English
“But What Has Helga Crane to Do with the West Indies? Plantation Afterlives in the Black Atlantic” situates the emergence of the southern gothic in modernist American and Caribbean works as a response to the shifting cultural narrative of the plantation in the twentieth century. In this project, I argue that the plantation seeps out of its place and time to haunt landscapes it may never have touched and times in which slavery is long over. While the plantation system is broadly recognized as a literary, political, and cultural force in nineteenth-century literary studies, I conceive it is also a …
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
“I’Ve Known Rivers:” Representations Of The Mississippi River In African American Literature And Culture, Catherine Gooch
Theses and Dissertations--English
My dissertation, titled “I’ve Known Rivers”: Representations of the Mississippi River in African American Literature and Culture, uncovers the impact of the Mississippi River as a powerful, recurring geographical feature in twentieth-century African American literature that conveys the consequences of capitalist expansion on the individual and communal lives of Black Americans. Recent scholarship on the Mississippi River theorizes the relationship between capitalism, geography, and slavery. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the …
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Women Of The Apocalypse: Afrospeculative Feminist Novelists, Bianca L. Spriggs
Theses and Dissertations--English
“Women of the Apocalypse: Feminist Afrospeculative Writers,” seeks to address the problematic ‘Exodus narrative,’ a convention that has helped shape Black American liberation politics dating back to the writings of Phyllis Wheatley. Novels by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker undermine and complicate this narrative by challenging the trope of a single charismatic male leader who leads an entire race to a utopic promised land. For these writers, the Exodus narrative is unsustainable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because there is no room for women to operate outside of the role of …